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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Is America Ready to Make Reparations?
00:49:12
Late in the Civil War, the Union general William T. Sherman confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land from Confederate planters and ordered it redistributed, in forty-acre lots, to formerly enslaved people—a promise revoked by President Andrew Johnson almost as soon as it was made. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the debate on what America owes to the descendants of slaves, or to people robbed by the legal discrimination that followed, still rages. David Remnick talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Susan B. Glasser about how reparations has become a major focus in the 2020 Democratic primary contest. And we’ll visit Georgetown University, where students have chosen to take reparations upon themselves.
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Narrator/Producer
From one World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
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David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's not often that an article comes along that changes the world. And that's exactly what happened with ta Nehisi Coates 5 years ago now when he wrote the case for reparations. That article in the Atlantic was a very big deal, to say the least.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
I was shocked at how big it was. I can remember going up to the Red Rooster to meet somebody for lunch in Harlem's Restaurant in Harlem. And I was leaving, and there were two people at the bar. It was a black woman and a black dude who were older. And the dude's eyes get so big, and he just, oh, my God. Oh, my God. And the woman said to me, she said, praise God. Praise God. And he runs into the car and he has an Atlantic. Please sign it. Sign. Praise God. I was like, what?
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David Remnick
Wow.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
And I would show up places and people would ask me to sign the paper. People who couldn't get access to the magazine would, like, print it out and would come because they're, like, sold out. At a certain point, Ta Nehisi Coates.
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David Remnick
Somehow got everybody talking about reparations. Now, that subject had been discussed since the end of the Civil War, and in fact, there's a bill that's been sitting in Congress for 30 years about reparations. But now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination is a real subject of major discussion among the Democratic presidential candidates. We're going to spend the entire hour of our program today talking about what exactly are reparations and what the political future of them might be. I talked to Ta Nehisi Coates last week. Ta Nehisi, for those who may not have read the article five years ago, what exactly is the case that you make for reparations, which is a word that's been around for a long, long time?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
The case I make for reparations is virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African American community. I think what has often been missing, this is what I was trying to make the point of in 2014, that behind all of that, you know, oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community. That theft of resources continued, you know, well into the period of, I would make the argument, you know, around the time of the Fair Housing Act.
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David Remnick
So what year is that?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
So that's 1968. There are a lot of people.
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David Remnick
But you're not saying that between 1968 and 2019, everything is hunky dory.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
I'm not saying everything was hunky dory at all, but I'm trying. If you were speaking to, you know, the most important, intellectually honest, dubious person, because you have to remember what I'm battling against this idea is that it ended in 1865 with emancipation and the.
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David Remnick
End of the world.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Emancipation. Yes, yes, yes. And the case I'm trying to make is within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.
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David Remnick
A lot of your article was about Chicago housing policy. It was a very technical analysis of housing policy. When people talked to me about the article, and I could tell they hadn't read it, said is kind of hussey making a case for it? No, no. I said, first and foremost, it's a dissection of a particular policy as emblematic of so many other policies.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
So out of all of those policies of theft, I had to pick one, you know, and that was really my goal. And the one I picked was housing, was our housing policy. You know, again, we have this notion that, you know, housing as it exists today sort of sprung up from black people, you know, coming north, maybe not finding the jobs that they want, bringing, you know, and thus forming, you know, some sort of pathological culture. And white people just being concerned citizens, fled to the suburbs. But beneath that was policy. The reason why black people were confined to those neighborhoods in the first place and white people had access to neighborhoods further away was because of political decision. The government underwrote that through FHA loans, through the GI Bill, and that in turn caused a devaluing of black neighborhoods and an inability to access credit to even improve neighborhoods.
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David Remnick
Now, your article starts with someone who lived through these racist policies, a man named Clyde Ross. Tell us the story of Clyde Ross. How did he react to the article?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
So Mr. Ross was living on the west side of Chicago.
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David Remnick
He started out in Mississippi.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Started out in Mississippi in the 1920s. Born in Mississippi under Jim Crow. His family lost their land. Had their land basically stolen from them, had his horse stolen from him. He goes off fights in World War II, comes back. Like a lot of people said, I can't live in Clarkston. I just. I can't be here. I'm gonna kill somebody or I'm gonna get killed. Comes up to Chicago in Chicago, all of the social conventions of Jim Crow are gone. You done had to move off the street because somebody white is walking back, doesn't have to take his hat off or look down or anything like that. Gets a job at a Campbell's Soup company. And he wants the last emblem of the American dream. He wants home ownership. Couldn't go to the bank and get a loan like everybody else.
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David Remnick
And he was making a decent wage.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Making a decent wage enough that he could save some money and, you know, enough for a down payment. And obviously, he has no knowledge, none of us really did at that point, of what was actually happening, of why this was, you know, no concept of federal policy, really. And so what he ends up with is, you know, basically a contract lender, which is a private, you know, lender who says, you know, hey, you give me the down payment and you own the house. But what they actually did was they kept a deed for the house, and you had to pay off the house in its entirety in order to get the deed. Although you were effectively a renter, you had all of, you know, lack of privilege that a renter has, and yet all the responsibilities that a buyer has. So if something goes wrong in the house, you have to pay for that. And so these fees would just pile up on these people, and they would lose their houses, and you don't get your down payment back. Clyde Ross is one of the few people who was able to actually keep his home.
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David Remnick
There's such a moving moment in the piece where he's sitting with you and he admits, we were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know. We were that ignorant. And felt that his ignorance had extended to his understanding of life in America, in Chicago, which had seemed to use the phrase of the Great Migration, the Promised Land.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Right, right. And he felt like a soccer.
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Melisande Short Colombe
And.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
It felt stupid, just as anybody would. And I don't think he knew on the level, the extent to which the con actually went. And then living in a community of people, and this was something I didn't get in the piece, but living in a community of people who are being ripped off and they couldn't talk about it to each other because they wanted to maintain this sort of facade or this front that they own their homes, not that somebody else actually held the deed. And so for a long time, there was a great period of silence, you know, about it.
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David Remnick
Did Mr. Ross react to your piece?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Yeah, he did.
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David Remnick
What'd he say?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
He said, reparations will never happen.
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David Remnick
So in the aftermath of the piece, the piece comes out 15,000 words in the Atlantic. Tremendous interest in it. You said this about the piece, I think it was in the Washington Post. You said, when I wrote the case for reparations, my notion wasn't that you could actually get reparations passed, even in my lifetime. My notion was that you could get people to stop laughing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Right.
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David Remnick
What'd you mean?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Well, I mean, it was a Dave Chappelle joke, you know, and sort of what the joke was was if black people got reparations, all the silly, dumb things they would actually do, meaning, you know, buy cars, buy rims, you know, fancy clothes, you know, as though other people don't do those things, you know. And once I started researching not just the fact of plunder, but actually the history of the reparations fight, which literally goes back to the American Revolution. You know, George Washington, when he dies in his will, he leaves things to those who are enslaved. It wasn't a foreign notion that if you had stripped people of something, you might actually owe them something. It really only, you know, became foreign after the Civil War and emancipation. And so I realized this is quite a dignified idea, and actually an idea there was quite a bit of literature on. And, you know, the notion that it was somehow funnier, I thought really, really diminished what was a serious, trenchant and deeply, deeply perceptive idea.
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David Remnick
If you visited Israel between the 50s and a certain time, you would see Mercedes Benz taxis all over the country, and you'd wonder, this is not a particularly rich country, at least not yet. This was reparations. This was part of the reparations payment from Germany to Israel. And in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Second World War. What does reparations look like now?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Because they give them vouchers to buy German goods. Right.
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David Remnick
What's being asked for? The rewriting of textbooks, the public discussion, what in terms of policy. How do you look at it?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
So first, you need the actual crime document. You need, like, what you would get is the official imprimatur of the state to say this actually happened. You know, I just think that's a crucial, crucial first step. And the second reason you have a commission is to figure out how we pay it back. You know, I think it's crucial to tie reparations to specific acts, which, again, why you need a study. This is not, you know, I checked black on my census. Therefore, you know, I don't think I'll give you an example of this. For instance, we have what I would almost call a pilot but significant reparations program right now actually running in Chicago, John Burge, who ran this terrible, you know, unit of police officers that tortured black people and sent a lot of, you know, innocent black people to jail, you know, over the course of, I think it was like 20 or so years. And then once he was found out in Chicago, there was a reparations plan put together where his victims were actually given reparations. But in addition to that, crucial to that, they changed how they taught history. And you had to actually teach John Byrne. You had to actually teach people about what actually happened. So it wasn't just the money. There was some sort of, I hesitate to say educational, but I guess that's the word we use, the educational element to it. And I just think you can't win this argument by trying to hide the ball, not in the long term, you know. And so I think both of those things are crucial.
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David Remnick
TA NEHISI so as of this moment in 2019, there are more than 20 Democratic presidential candidates running. Eight of them have said they'll support a bill to create, at least create a commission to study reparations. What do you make of that? Is it symbolic or is it lip service, or is it just a way to secure the black vote? Or is it something much more serious than all that?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
It's probably in some measure, all four of those things. It certainly is symbolic. Supporting a commission is not reparations in and of itself. It's certainly lip service from at least some of the candidates. I'm actually less sure about in terms of the black vote. This, you know, it may ultimately be true that this is something that, you know, folks rally around for votes, but that's never been my sense.
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David Remnick
Are there candidates that you take more seriously than others when they talk about reparations?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Yeah, I think Elizabeth Warren is probably serious.
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David Remnick
In what way?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
I think she means it. I mean, I guess we'll break a little news. After case for reparations came out, she just asked me to come and talk one on one with her about it.
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David Remnick
This is five years ago and your piece came out in the Atlanta.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Yeah, maybe it was a little later than that. Cause I was, you know, but it was about the time. It was well before she declared, you know, anything about running for president.
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David Remnick
And what was your conversation with Elizabeth Warren like?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
She had read it. She was deeply serious and she had questions. And it wasn't like, will you do X, Y and Z for me? You know, it wasn't like, I'm trying to demonstrate my serious. Therefore, will you? I have not heard from her since either, by the way, have you talked.
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David Remnick
To any candidates about it?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
No.
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David Remnick
Ta. Nehisi, you published your article five years ago. Barack Obama was president. We are now in a different time and place. How would you place the reparations discussion in this moment?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Yeah, I think people have stopped laughing, and I think that's really, really important. You know, does it mean reparations tomorrow? No, it doesn't. Does it mean end of the fight? No, it doesn't, but it's a step, you know, and I think that's significant.
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David Remnick
Now, what would you like to see the outcome of a conversation or the American equivalent of South African study into American history?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Be a policy for repair. You know, I think what you need to do is you need to figure out what the exact axes of white supremacy are and have been and, you know, find out a policy, you know, to repair each of those. In other words, it's not just a mass payment. So take the area that I researched. The time I wrote the article, less every day, the time I wrote the article, they were living victims and all living victims who had been denied, who.
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David Remnick
Were on the south side and the west side of Chicago.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Yeah. All over this country. All over this country, people who had been deprived, who had been discriminated against. Set up a claims office. Look at the census tracts. Are those people actually still living there? You know, maybe you can design, you know, some sort of, you know, investment through resource. Maybe you can have something at the individual level, maybe you can have something at the neighborhood level. And then you would go down the line, you would look at education, you would look at our criminal justice policy, you would go down the line and address these specifically and directly.
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David Remnick
Is your job to just break the glass on a subject the way you do with reparations, or is it your job to then follow through the way a scholar would for years thereafter? Do you feel your work here is done? And now I'm moving on to the next thing. And as you have with any number of subjects, or do you have to sustain it? Is that on you?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
I don't know. I really don't know. I would like to be able to move on, but I recognize that that's not entirely up to me, you know?
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David Remnick
It's not.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
No, not at all. I just feel like if you write an article on reparations, that has the effect that it actually does, which I didn't expect. It's very hard to say. I have to conclude that I clearly have something to say and a way of saying it that can affect things. So if that's the case, what is your responsibility then? What right have you to say, I'm done talking about this? Because I feel like it, I don't know that you get to do that. You know, I'm actually, I feel myself to be very, very grounded in the African American struggle, even though I'm not, you know, I don't consider myself an activist. When I think about writing that article, I think about all the people before me who had been making the case for reparations from, you know, street corners, you know, 125th in Harlem, and couldn't get access, you know, to an august publication like that. And I think about how I got access, and it strikes me that you owe folks something, you know, you don't get to just do what you want.
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David Remnick
Ta Nehisi Coates, thank you so much.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Thanks for having me.
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David Remnick
TA Nehisi Coates is the author of between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power. His short story Conduction, which is an excerpt of a forthcoming novel, is in the next issue of the New Yorker.
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Carl Hancock Rucks
Come on and bring on the reparations for all the unrequited home runs Brothers be burning up the bases the crowd be going mad Brothers be crossing over home plate Go outside and can't catch a cab for little Richie teaching the Beatles how to scream like Aunt Jemima without her pancakes and all the other dark and unknown rockers electrified the republic sanctified shaking that cold war out of the booty Body politics Come on and bring on the reparations Come on, Bring.
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David Remnick
On the Reparations is by the late Sekou Sundiata. Excerpts from the poem are read for us by Carl Hancock Rucks for the.
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Carl Hancock Rucks
Birmingham Gospel Four Little girls Come Sunday for the Jesus remix and those redneck street fire hoes Mad Dog's crucifix. And what exactly did you say you were doing at the time about soft shoe on the rock of edges for the privilege in your skin A wounded knee and a trail of tears for the Indians Come on and bring on the reparations for the spook with the metal detector sitting by your door open just enough probably to a spoonful of cocaine on the table Monica on her knees doing Secret Service, you humming manda rap song what about all those flags we so proudly hail? Marvin Gaye singing oh say can you see Wearing shades like mirrors at the all star game so you can reflect yourself relaxed and feeling good that dark looker doing his looking like he was blind bearing witness to the whiteness of whiteness Pretending you was the only one who could see. Tis after all about thee, just like you like it. Mercy, mercy me. And so on and so forth. For the missing royalty checks, and so on and so forth. For a VD in Tuskegee called Syphilis, and so on and so forth. Think of it. Think of it as the down payment on the interest compounded them 40 acres notwithstanding that mule, notwithstanding, multiplied, quantified, digitized. What to say about forgiveness between you and your God? Come on and bring on the reparations.
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David Remnick
Carl Hancock rocks. Read from Come on. Bring on the Reparations by Sekou Sundiata. You can hear the poem in its entirety@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. With 20 plus Democratic candidates vying for the nomination, one way to get attention is to stake out bold positions on controversial issues. And that may be why we're seeing at least eight candidates endorsing in one form or another, a move toward reparations for historical wrongs against African Americans. One of the most outspoken on the issue is former HUD secretary Julian Castro, whom I talked to recently. I've long believed that we should consider reparations because as I see it, it's one of those moral debts, this original sin of the country that has not been paid. Some people say, well, nobody alive today was a slaveholder. Nobody alive today was a slave. And I say, if the government takes your property today and then you pass away tomorrow, your estate still has a claim for that taking. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and others are all talking about the issue. And even a long shot candidate like Marianne Williamson, the self help guru, has suggested a dollar value for reparations, which she puts at 100 to 500 billion dollars. To understand how this issue suddenly became so hot in 2020 campaign politics, I caught up with our Washington correspondent Susan Glasser. Susan, in 1989, 30 years ago, John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill which would set up a commission to study, to study reparations. Now, how has this issue been treated by Washington for the last 30 years?
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Susan Glasser
Well, I would say the fact that it hasn't gone anywhere for 30 years and that actually Congressman Conyers spent decades introducing it every year and then all ultimately retired without it going anywhere. It's now the cause has been taken up now by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is a reminder that mostly it's been seen as something that's too hot to.
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David Remnick
Handle because it was considered marginal. Is what you're saying?
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Susan Glasser
Well, not just marginal, actually. I think really too politically controversial. There is a deep aversion on Capitol Hill to doing things that are seen as explicitly race conscious legislative actions. I do think that up until now, even many senior members of the Black Caucus, for example, while endorsing the measure, have been wary of pursuing it too far because they've perceived or feared that the term reparations itself might be a turnoff to people who might otherwise support those proposals. When you have seen some of these candidates who've endorsed the concept of reparations, asked about it, like Kamala Harris, for example, she has quickly pivoted to not really talk about reparations so much as, oh, by the way, I have this proposal about housing or I have this proposal about a tax credit, things like that. And you see many of the candidates doing that.
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David Remnick
It seems to me that the one person in the race that has a very specific proposal to put forward that's related at least to reparations is Cory Booker of New Jersey. Senator Cory Booker, who sponsored a bill to study reparations in the Senate and has been a vocal proponent of something called baby bonds. Could you explain what that is?
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Susan Glasser
Senator Booker's proposal of baby bonds, as I understand it, would essentially give a certain amount of money to parents.
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David Remnick
And the studies, he would give $1,000 to every newborn child, essentially beginning an account.
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Susan Glasser
Well, that's right. And the people who favor this have studied what would the impact of it be. And that's where it appears that it would really disproportionately benefit black families because they have, in fact, disproportion suffered from the lack of family wealth. There's such an incredible gap still, the numbers are so striking between the average wealth of an African American family vis a vis a white family in this country. But again, it's not targeted. It doesn't have the words African American in the title of the proposal. It would benefit poor families from different backgrounds across the board. And yet, because it would be of particular benefit to the black community, it's something that Senator Booker talks about when he talks about his support for reparations. Overall.
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David Remnick
Senator Warren has a bill which would support communities affected by redlining, which was really the core of Ta Nehisi Coates's article, the description of redlining in Chicago, housing policy in Chicago, and the racism that was involved there. And is there. What do you make of the politics of that position?
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Susan Glasser
You know, Senator Warren has been by far the sort of dominant policy voice and ideas generator in the campaign. And she's had a longstanding interest dating back to that Coats article and perhaps even before that, on the divergent impacts of, say, credit and access to credit on African Americans and other communities. That was her academic field of interest at Harvard Law School. And I think the measures that she's proposed on redlining are kind of comparable to that in a way, and looking at targeted ways, very specific ways in which communities, minority communities, are impacted by unequal access to things like credit or mortgages. And so, you know, I find that to be a really fruitful and much more realistic form of the reparations conversation than to think that America is suddenly going to engage in a big national soul searching and on the level debate about history and the terrible long term costs of slavery in the United States.
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David Remnick
Now, Joe Biden, who entered the race recently, is now way ahead in the polls. He's way ahead of Bernie Sanders. And the two of them are ahead of almost everybody else, 20 odd candidates. Where is Joe Biden on reparations and where's Bernie Sanders?
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Susan Glasser
I have a sense that it's something that Biden would support in a general sense. It's not a pillar of his campaign. Now, Bernie Sanders is an interesting figure, figure in this discussion. He explicitly refused to endorse this in the 2016 campaign, received some criticism around this. And as you know, the Sanders campaign in general in 2016, in the primaries, found it hard for him to connect with African American voters. He did not draw a significant amount of his support. And in general, as a Democratic socialist, by his own definition, Sanders has long favored the types of reform proposals that look to fix economic inequality rather than focusing on race based discrimination. And so, you know, there's an uncomfortableness that you see from Bernie Sanders in taking on something like this. And I think Sanders may end up doing well with a coalition that is even whiter than the coalition that he had in 2016 because those voters have other candidates to support this time.
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David Remnick
Where is the national polling around reparations? Who's for it, who's against it, whether it's studying reparations or doing something even more concrete.
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Susan Glasser
Well, again, I think many surveys don't register this. It's not been at the top of the agenda. I was struck by the fact that there were a couple polls, one in 2016, one in 2018, which both found remarkably similar levels of support for it. Only around 26%, around a quarter of the country saying in these surveys that they favored reparations. So it's not the thing that foremost springs to mind. But that in part reflects a lack of sustained national attention around the conversation.
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David Remnick
I would say, obviously, this conversation is taking place in the context of a presidency that is marked by Charlottesville. It's marked by racist rhetoric. There's really no other way to put it, to be truthful. So how does a conversation, at least in the Democratic primary race, on reparations play in terms of the overall politics of the country in November 2020?
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Susan Glasser
I suspect that one of the reasons is Donald Trump. One of the reasons is the racist rhetoric coming from the President of the United States. One looking at the post Charlottesville world and political discourse that we're having, and that this is a way of resistance. It's a way for Democratic candidates to come out and say, not only am I in favor of doing the historically correct thing, but also it's a way of marking yourself in opposition to the sort of toxic racial politics coming out of the president. I'm here in Washington where we've been having this fascinating debate at Georgetown University about the concept of the university's possible reparations owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold by the Jesuit founders of the school to keep it afloat.
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David Remnick
Well, I'm really glad you bring that up because we're gonna take a look exactly at what's going on in the Georgetown case. Thanks a lot, Susan. Always good talking to you.
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Susan Glasser
Oh, thank you very much. It was a great conversation.
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David Remnick
Susan Glasser is a Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. We'll look at slavery and reparations on campus in just a minute. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've been talking this hour about reparations, a policy that would give some kind of compensation to the descendants of people who. Who were enslaved or who suffered from legal discrimination. Right up until recent times, this is usually thought of in terms of government programs of one kind or another. But we've also begun to see steps toward what we might call voluntary reparations. Georgetown University could make history this year with the first slavery reparations program ever proposed by a student body on themselves. Our producer, Kalalea, went to find out what it's all about.
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Narrator/Producer
In 2016, a chef in New Orleans named Melisande Short Colombe was working her shift when she got this Facebook message.
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Susan Glasser
Hi, Melisanne, you don't know me. I'm a genealogist in Baton Rouge. I'm doing some research on the Mahoney family. Was your grandmother related to them? If you're interested in the family history. I'll be happy to share what I have. Many thanks, Judy.
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Melisande Short Colombe
I looked at the message. I read it two times. I turned it off, and I put it back in my pocket, and I went back to work.
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Narrator/Producer
Melisan, or Meli, finished her shift, ate a grilled cheese sandwich, then responded.
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Melisande Short Colombe
I wrote her back that I was not related to that family. And I gave her a written list of the people that I knew going back seven generations who were my ancestors in Louisiana. They asked me if I would do a DNA test. They sent it to me. I gave them the samples, sent it off, and I went on vacation. And for two weeks, the only thing I did was do the research that I had never done, having the information that I had from my family. I drank painkillers, and I sat at my computer.
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Narrator/Producer
If you're wondering about drinking painkillers, so was I.
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Melisande Short Colombe
It is not a pill. It is a rum based drink that you make in batches and pour over ice.
- [31:18]
Narrator/Producer
Mellie already knew that her ancestors had come to Louisiana from Maryland. But the genealogist told her something she did not know. That her ancestors, the Mahoneys, had been kept as slaves by Jesuit priests. What was going through your mind? What were you feeling?
- [31:36]
Melisande Short Colombe
Well, I have to be completely honest with you.
- [31:39]
Richard Cellini
Yes.
- [31:41]
Melisande Short Colombe
It is one thing to know that you were enslaved, theoretically. It is another thing when you know that you were enslaved by men who identify as the Society of Jesus. There became somebody I could be mad at.
- [32:06]
Narrator/Producer
The Jesuits who own her ancestors were running Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. mellie's family were among nearly 300 people they sold in 1838 to work on sugarcane plantations in Louisiana.
- [32:21]
Melisande Short Colombe
We was cane cutters. We were sold to concentrated labor camps. So my family worked hard in the typical American way, except that in the beginning, we were enslaved and we worked for free folks. Right here would be my family.
- [32:50]
Narrator/Producer
What are their names? Can you read them?
- [32:52]
Melisande Short Colombe
Sure. Robert and Mary. And Robert is 43. Mary is 35. Abraham. 16. Robert. 14. James. 12. Bridget. 11. Mary. Jane. 10. Susan. 8.
- [33:18]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sally.
- [33:18]
Melisande Short Colombe
Sally Ann. 7. Nellie. 6.
- [33:23]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Charles.
- [33:24]
Melisande Short Colombe
Charles. 5. One child.
- [33:28]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Somebody's listed as one child. Those are Mahoneys. There are other Mahoneys as well.
- [33:33]
Narrator/Producer
Professor Adam Rothman has taught a class at Georgetown about the university's history with slavery.
- [33:40]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
You see those names in that document and other bills of sale. But at the same time, we have these sacramental registers, we have records kept by the Jesuits of people they baptized, they married, and they buried. So it seems to me that if you can understand how the Jesuits could baptize their slaves one day and sell them the next, then you have a pretty good grasp of the history of American slavery.
- [34:09]
Narrator/Producer
The Georgetown slave sale wasn't a secret. But after an article was published in the school newspaper in 2014, many students on campus began protesting. This was around the same time the police killing of Michael Brown and Ferguson, and tensions were already high. College students all over the country were enraged. The president of Georgetown formed a working group to try to deal with the growing frustrations. And one alumnus who had been following the issue was Richard Cellini. He's a lawyer and businessman in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- [34:47]
Richard Cellini
I really stumbled into this by accident. I'm a moderate Republican. I'm a businessman. I'm a white person. I don't know anything about social justice. I don't know anything about genealogy.
- [34:57]
Narrator/Producer
But Richard decided to get involved. He sent an email.
- [35:01]
Richard Cellini
Here's what I wrote. To the senior member of the working.
- [35:03]
Narrator/Producer
Group, who he didn't wish to name.
- [35:06]
Richard Cellini
This whole controversy has been about Georgetown to date. What Georgetown did, what Georgetown thinks, what Georgetown feels, what Georgetown remembers, who Georgetown should honor and who Georgetown should higher. In some respects, this is charmingly traditional, but I say this, who gives a flip about what is and what is not included in the official Georgetown campus tours? Georgetown itself. Reparations should be made where reparations are due to the Descendants of the 272 slaves that Father Mullady sold to a plantation in Louisiana in 1838. Georgetown should stop talking about what Georgetown should be doing to or for Georgetown and focus instead on what Georgetown should be doing for the people it abandoned so very long ago.
- [35:51]
Narrator/Producer
Richard sent the message in November of 2015, and on the very same day he got this response.
- [35:57]
Richard Cellini
Dear Richard, the problem with making some sort of reparation to the descendants of the slaves sold south is that as far as we can tell, all of them quickly succumbed to a fever in the malodorous swamp world of Louisiana. I had students do a research project a couple of years back to see if we could locate their descendants. The best available evidence suggests that almost all of them immediately succumbed to the hostile climate and the harsh labor conditions into which they were so suddenly and cruelly submitted. And I must have read it three or four times. And I just stared at it in disbelief because I thought, this just isn't possible. Even the Titanic had survivors.
- [36:45]
Narrator/Producer
And Richard was right. Because it was completely untrue. He started doing his own research. Within weeks, he founded a non profit independent of the university. He named it the Georgetown Memory Project. The Genealogist who had asked Mellie about her ancestors in 2016, was hired by the memory project. So far, they've identified 4,000 living descendants of the roughly 300 people sold in 1838. And they're still looking to the members.
- [37:17]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Of the descendant community, many of you who have traveled long distances to be here at Georgetown.
- [37:24]
Narrator/Producer
The institution was doing what institutions do. Two campus buildings were renamed, and a department of African American studies was founded. In 2017, a remembrance ceremony was held.
- [37:39]
David Remnick
The legacy of slavery that involves us all.
- [37:43]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Personally, I welcome you all to our.
- [37:47]
David Remnick
Liturgy of remembrance, of contrition of hope.
- [37:54]
Narrator/Producer
Mellie had come from New Orleans to be at the remembrance ceremony. That day, she had learned of one additional benefit the university would offer. All 4,000 living descendants of. Of enslaved people would be granted legacy status, meaning that if they applied for admission to Georgetown, they'd be given special consideration, like the children of alumni.
- [38:21]
Melisande Short Colombe
I was feeling a little itchy, maybe, about something to do. My back was hurting, my arms were tired, I'd been cooking too long. And I said, started thinking about what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And lo and behold, fill out an application to Georgetown University really just popped up into my mind.
- [38:44]
Narrator/Producer
At the age of 63, Mellie was accepted to Georgetown University. She's a sophomore now.
- [38:51]
Melisande Short Colombe
Welcome to Georgetown.
- [38:53]
David Remnick
Thank you.
- [38:57]
Melisande Short Colombe
These days, the semester is coming to an end. Spring has sprung. Finals are soon to begin.
- [39:07]
Narrator/Producer
I visited Mellie in the final week of classes. She stands out on campus. Her hair is gray and cut short, and she's wearing loose pants, not leggings or jeans, more like what you wear at the beach. Mellie is one of five descendants who currently attend Georgetown.
- [39:26]
Melisande Short Colombe
So when I first got here, I had my clothes, a bed that was up too high in the air, and I had to climb up into my bed at night. And I haven't slept in the air like that ever in my life. Really? Like bunk beds? I didn't do bunk. I never did a bunk bed thing, so that was a little different. And the last.
- [39:52]
Narrator/Producer
In her second semester, Mellie joined a student led group, the GU272 advocacy group. They felt that the university's response hadn't been enough. Legacy status is a start, but it only benefits those who have a chance of getting accepted to a highly selective school. They had a more significant demand in mind. A reparations fund to benefit all the descendants, Something no educational institution has ever done. And they got a referendum on reparations introduced to the student body, which would be a small surcharge added to the tuition bill for undergrads. It was intensely debated on campus.
- [40:34]
Father Matthew Carnes
In the coming months, the GU272 advocacy team will try to convince you that the obligations of Georgetown sins fall squarely on its student body.
- [40:45]
Narrator/Producer
Truthfully, I couldn't get a single anti referendum student to talk to me on the record. But an editorial on the student paper expressed one common view.
- [40:54]
Father Matthew Carnes
While we agree that the Georgetown of today would not exist if not for the sale of 272 slaves in 1838, current students are not to blame for the past sins of the institution. And a financial contribution cannot reconcile this past debt. On behalf of the university.
- [41:15]
Narrator/Producer
I talked to a student named Javon Price who was against the students paying reparations until he attended a town hall meeting on campus. He's a member of the College Republicans as well as the rotc.
- [41:28]
David Remnick
What made me go to the town hall was the fact that I was undoubtedly against the referendum to begin with. At the town hall event, I raised my hand and I said, why should I? Why do I, as an African American student and as a descendant of slaves myself, be required to pay any type of fee to address the university's sin of slavery, of enslavement, selling of human beings? Why do I have to contribute to this as an African American student when at the end of the day, this has affected me and my community as well?
- [42:01]
Narrator/Producer
Melli was sitting in front of Javon.
- [42:03]
Melisande Short Colombe
At the time, and I turned around in my seat and I looked at him directly and I said to him, you had the choice. You have the choice to come here. And every student who comes to this campus comes believing that there is something here that they will receive that will benefit them in the rest of their lives. The people who were sold and enslaved for 150 years, their lack of voice and choice provided for everybody here to choose to walk through the gates to receive their benefit and to take that out into the world and leverage that to make their lives better, the world better, and their families better.
- [42:59]
Narrator/Producer
And what were you thinking at the moment when she said that to you? What was going through your head? What did you say?
- [43:06]
David Remnick
The moment I got Melly's response, I sat back down and quite frankly, I shut up and I listened for the rest of the town hall and I allowed myself at that moment to just receive the information that I had been rejecting.
- [43:24]
Narrator/Producer
The reparations fee was pretty small, 1/10 of one person of tuition. But the students I talked to compared this moment to the era of the Vietnam War. Everybody felt that there was something Much larger at stake. Are we going to stop talking about the legacy of slavery and just do something about it? The vote took place on April 11.
- [43:52]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Results overnight show students at Georgetown University.
- [43:55]
David Remnick
Support paying reparations to help atone for the school's past.
- [43:59]
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Undergraduates voted overwhelmingly yesterday in favor of a $27 per semester fee to benefit descendants of 272 slaves who were sold by the school in the 1800s.
- [44:12]
Narrator/Producer
The students vote is non binding, but Georgetown takes student government very seriously. It would be hard for the board of Trustees to simply ignore it. And if they act on the vote, Georgetown will make history as the first educational institution to make financial reparations for slavery. The money would go into a fund to be used by the descendants for education, microloans or health care expenses. The details are still being discussed, though.
- [44:41]
Richard Cellini
When people say, today this is all about money, my answer is, of course it's about money. It's always been about money.
- [44:47]
Narrator/Producer
Again, that's Richard Cellini, who founded the Georgetown Memory Project.
- [44:51]
Richard Cellini
Money is what was taken from these families. And so in restitution, money is what must be given.
- [45:00]
Narrator/Producer
I'd been wondering why the Jesuits themselves haven't made reparations. The order recently sold some of its land to the state of Maryland for a reported $57 million. I put the question to Father Matthew Carnes, a Jesuit priest who teaches in the government department at Georgetown. How come there hasn't been a gesture, a financial gesture, on the part of the Jesuit organization who clearly have a lot of money? At least it seems that way.
- [45:29]
Father Matthew Carnes
Well, you know, Dennis, that's something that's going forward is a conversation. Georgetown, the Jesuits and the descendants have worked with the Kellogg foundation to actually have a structured set of conversations now about what might this look like? And that I think will lead to significant commitments. I'm not the head of the Jesuits. I don't know what those commitments will look like. But it strikes me that we need to really listen to one another.
- [45:59]
Narrator/Producer
He didn't quite answer the question, but I left campus feeling hopeful about this young generation who voted for the referendum. They've chosen to to see it as their collective responsibility. They're doing what their elders and ancestors could not or would not do. And Father Carnes put his finger on something, something that I heard from a lot of students. They're taking reparations personally.
- [46:26]
Father Matthew Carnes
If people ask, you know, what should you learn from this? When it actually puts you in spaces where you realize my own privilege means that I have opportunities that I have to think about, are there ways for me to relinquish them or share them? Do I need to admit that I have taken pride in things that I've seen as achievements of my own that may really be built on the backs of others? Boy, that's a humbling thing to do. I think that we should always feel uncomfortable with this history. It should always ask us about how now, whatever, 2039, should we be addressing this legacy in our country? We, we shouldn't say, well, you know, in 2019, we did this and we put it behind us. There will always be a way at which we need to ask ourselves these hard questions.
- [47:20]
Narrator/Producer
The referendum results will go before Georgetown's board in June. As of now, they have no deadline for making a decision.
- [47:30]
Melisande Short Colombe
I hope that all of the parents and every professor and the administrators, whatever their personal feelings, are about the referendum, that they admire the initiative of the students. Maybe you'll have the occasion to come back again. This is not the end of the story at all.
- [47:54]
Narrator/Producer
No, it's the beginning.
- [48:00]
David Remnick
That's Kalalea, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, and she spoke with Melisande Short Colomb. I'm David Remnick and thank you for joining me. This week we're going to go even deeper on the issue of reparations on our podcast with a special episode featuring the Columbia University sociologist Alondra Nelson. She's trying to understand a recent controversy over who should be eligible for reparations. You can subscribe to the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks and have a wonderful week.
- [48:34]
Narrator/Producer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman Khalil, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell Mitchell, Sarah Nix and Steven Valentino, with help from Caroline Lester, Emily Mann and Mong Fei Chen. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.